You can’t imagine how good it is to be me.

by maddrunkgenius

“But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.”

And here he’s 29, and presumably not an alcoholic, but he has the most familiar feeling in the world to me, at least when I’m not drinking. (And occasionally when I am, but that’s terrifying.)

I am sometimes so miserable that I honestly, literally want to die and if it were easy enough, if I could just push some button and go away not to have to suffer or yearn or think ever again, I surely would, at least some of the time.

Oh, but you can’t imagine how good it is when the good times come. Hours, days of energy, cleverness, productivity, wit. Then I feel like I’m going to live forever, never fall asleep ever again, ever ever.

(Sleep is the small death because you never know when you wake up if you’ll be the same person.)

And nothing but the arched-back song of joy in a woman makes me happier than the great depressant. Nothing makes my heart flicker like a sniff of good bourbon on the rocks, and when I wake up in the morning thinking my previous night’s self to be an incomparable ass, I remind sober me, ‘He was you just a few hours ago, and he was fun to be around, and wild, and they’ll tell stories about him someday when he’s gone. No one ever told a story about you lying in bed reading io9 on your phone for an hour.’

If you feel like there’s nothing you can’t do, some of the time, you’re going to feel like you can’t do anything, too. I’d rather write Origin of the Species and want the whole world to end occasionally than do nothing and feel generally happy about it.

When things are awful, yes, they’re awful, but not heroin withdrawal awful or getting raped awful or losing a loved one awful. When they’re good they may not quite be heroin good, but they’re pretty damn good and it’s better to feel amazing and brilliant once in a while than not. I remember those days, and I’m not going back. Ever ever.